Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine's forests

Soil moisture is an important variable in forested and agricultural ecosystems alike, particularly under the recent drought conditions of past Maine summers. Despite the robust soil moisture monitoring networks and large, freely available databases, the cost of commercial soil moisture sensors and the power that they use to run can be prohibitive for researchers, foresters, farmers and others tracking the health of the land. Along with researchers at the University of New Hampshire and University of Vermont, UMaine's WiSe-Net designed a wireless sensor network that uses artificial intelligence to learn how to be more power efficient in monitoring soil moisture and processing the data. The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. "AI can learn from the environment, predict the wireless link quality and incoming solar energy to efficiently use limited energy and make a robust low cost network run longer and more reliably," says Ali Abedi, principal investigator of the recent study and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maine.